MADRID — The European elections on June 12 were a big defeat for Spanish prime minister Felipe Gonzalez. The right wing Popular Party profited from the crisis of the ruling Socialist Party, bogged down in numerous corruption scandals.
But after a very radical campaign, the Ünited Left (UL), Which is based on the ex-Communist Party. but which includes a wide spectrum of left wing opinion, scored a major success with 13.4 per cent of the vote.
Regional poli
This was reinforced by the results in the regional elections in Andalusia, also held on June 12, where the United Left scored nearly 20 per cent in a dynamic alliance with the Greens.
In absolute terms, the vote for the UL didn't go up very much from that obtained in the June 1993 general election - from 2.246.000 to 2,483,000. But the significance of the UL vote is much more than the absolute figure suggests.
The electoral turnout was much lower in the European elections than in the general election, so the UL's vote was a higher percentage (13.46 per cent a against 9.57 per cent); this is bigger than any other vote for a formation to the left of the PSOE since 1977.
The United Left defended a programme hostile to the Maastricht treaty (which implies move toward European capitalist integration and European-wide austerity):
Controversial However the UL presented a list of candidates which caused a lot of controversy in its ranks, because the top two positions on the list were occupied by people from its most politically moderate wing.
in the end that didn't really maiter, because the UL's best-known leader Julio Anguita was the key spokesperson at its meetings, and he presented a very radical left wing critique of the policies of the Gonzalez government — a crifoue mainly addressed to workers hil by austerity and unemployment /which is 25 per cent in Spain!).
Alternative
Anguita rightly presented the United Left a the sole left wing alternative in the eleclions.
Perhaps Anguita didn't put JUIA enough stress on the ecological and internationalist themes in the UL programme, or put enough stress on the fight against corruption. But given the moderation of some of the leading UL candidates his radicalism was important.
The judgment of the liberal daily El Pais is revealing: the campaign of the UL, it said, BNO was "moderate in form and Very radical in fundamental content" which "appeared to come from another age" (a reference to the 1970s when the Communist Party was strong). • Jaime Pastor is a supporter of the United Left in Madrid
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 65, 25 June 1994, Page 13